Samsung 870 EVO - Beware, certain batches prone to failure!

[JusTiCe8]

Could anyone tell me if it worth upgrading the firmware first then use the drive or should it be better to just return it while still brand new and sealed and hope to get one from a recent production batch ?

thanks.

 

[veodko]

What's funnier is that I have my system running on an 980 PRO 1TB M.2 drive that has only around 40TB total (read+write) and 9000hrs uptime.
It has 96% condition and 1BF0 uncorrectable errors (same amount as noticed errors).
I performed a full scan in magician which resulted in 4 "sectors" in bad condition.
I've also just read that these drives have software problems.. I have updated it but it's probably already too late. So far I had only Samsung drives fail despite being so expensive and hyped. Cheap shit such as crucial or WD just keeps going...

I guess that recovery failed because it's my system drive. What does the recovery do exactly? Should I pull the drive out and run recovery in another machine?

 

[pathtonowhere]

I bought four 870 EVOs and one of them (which I used a lot more than the others) developed bad sectors. I firmware-updated my other three 870 EVOs a few weeks ago and haven't developed any bad sectors yet. I scanned them twice and also copied everything from them without errors in an attempt to detect possible problems. There are two possibilities: 1 - they will fail in the next weeks or even months. 2 - the fact that I only kept them connected for a few days and updated them after that saved them.
I haven't sent the failed one to warranty because I was expecting the others to fail too and wanted to send all four of them at once, but they are still ok.

Are there any SSDs that don't fail, despite being manufactured in the same months as those who failed?

Also, Samsung should be ashamed of themselves, this is not how you treat customers.



PS: Ok, so I deleted the volume and formatted the bad 870 EVO, updated the firmware, created a new volume and scanned again. Now it hasn't got the bad sectors anymore. I didn't format this one together with the others because people everywhere said that once a drive goes bad, there's nothing you can do and no firmware update can fix it. It seems the update helped, but I don't know if it's temporary. Now I have to fill it again, use it for a while, and then try to copy things from it and scan it.
Maybe the firmware fix doesn't work only for the ones that get bricked and the ones with bad sectors can be fixed.

 

[Spathi]

Tool & Software Download | Samsung Semiconductor Global

Download various software related to your product, including Samsung Magician, designed for use with Samsung's memory products, and find related information.

semiconductor.samsung.com

SATA SSD-870 EVO Firmware... SVTO2B6Q
*The 870 EVO model will be manufactured with a revised V6 process starting November 2022

So does that mean, they are still inferring the firmware works for old drives , I suppose it does.

 

[pathtonowhere]

Unless Samsung claims so, I treat the drive as damaged and I still keep it in testing for a year (third back-up). The drive failed after some time, so I can't suppose that now if it works fine, it's 100% safe.
I'm sick of software (firmware is software, too), it gets worse and worse, bugs after bugs, thousands of updates to fix the bugs and introduce new ones. They all rush to release new software...

 

[unwind-protect]

I'm sick of software (firmware is software, too), it gets worse and worse, bugs after bugs, thousands of updates to fix the bugs and introduce new ones. They all rush to release new software...

... with no reasonable change notes.

 

[samsungthegreatest]

i give you one GOOD reason to buy one :
in 3 years, samsung won't have any stock, so just send a RMA at day-15 end warranti, and i'm pretty sure there will offer your a better model! 'like 4 or 8tb or next generation)

Haha yeah. And if they continue in current direction they'll send you 3D-FDLC SSD drive (3D - Fing-lot-level-cell). Which will store 8 bits in single NAND cell and be able to hold your data for 2 days max if there's good weather

I have got 6 EVO 870 4TB. All DEAD. 2 already RMA'd (RMA one, got replacement one from RMA and it died again ). Got another 4 in RAID10... 1 dead, 3 dying. These drives were able to crash RAID10 setup, there's no safer raid out there and it should never have happened.

This crap is just broken by design because there's no way it's a coincidence. They're producing worse and worse NAND chips with each generation. Got referred here from another forum so will post a link, really don't buy this crap.

Got 6 Samsung 870 EVO - 100% failure rate

HI Guys, had 6 of these (4TB version) and 100% are dead. For one i RMAd it, got a new one and the new one died again as well! Used with MOBO sata and...

forums.guru3d.com

And yeah the broken NVMe firmware. At least this can be fixed... if they're not able to f-up the hardware, they'll f-up the software. Or maybe it's totally broken just the software issues are manifesting first. It's a shame. The made so good drives, like 860 pro was great.

 

[JusTiCe8]

Is there any actual good quality and reliable SSD out there we could buy today ? Looks like the quest for the Holy Grail !
By the way, anyone could give me an answer to my previous post ?

Except selling crap, companies looks to no longer to care about what they sell.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Is there any actual good quality and reliable SSD out there we could buy today ? Looks like the quest for the Holy Grail !
By the way, anyone could give me an answer to my previous post ?

Except selling crap, companies looks to no longer to care about what they sell.

Return it, and get something else. I have had nothing but good luck from the WD stuff I have.

 

[samsungthegreatest]

Could anyone tell me if it worth upgrading the firmware first then use the drive or should it be better to just return it while still brand new and sealed and hope to get one from a recent production batch ?

thanks.

TBH return this crap and get sth else. They won't be able to fix this crappy hardware with any firmware. Maybe the new V6 production process is different. But they won't tell

Anyway if you want to stick with it - it'll be always better to get new hardware and new firmware as old one is for sure f-d up.

 

[unwind-protect]

Is there any actual good quality and reliable SSD out there we could buy today ? Looks like the quest for the Holy Grail !
By the way, anyone could give me an answer to my previous post ?

I'm buying the WD SN850x series right now.

 

[pathtonowhere]

I have got 6 EVO 870 4TB. All DEAD. 2 already RMA'd (RMA one, got replacement one from RMA and it died again ). Got another 4 in RAID10... 1 dead, 3 dying. These drives were able to crash RAID10 setup, there's no safer raid out there and it should never have happened.

Have you updated the replacement SDDs to the new firmware? Maybe they were old stock with the old firmware and that's why they failed again. And have you updated the firmware for the dying ones? The update fixed mine which had bad blocks. At least apparently. There's a possibility that the bad blocks were fixed when I formatted and made a new volume for it and the bad blocks were just isolated and new ones are going to appear. I won't know unless I use it for a few more months to see if any bad sectors appear. A nightmare. An expensive nightmare. And Samsung is treading us like lab rats, they try things on us but they refuse to tell us anything sensible related to the problem.

 

[brave]

Yes and i go from Samsung to WD before 2 week i buyed a very cheap from Ebay auction brand new WD Black SN850X 1TB for a 65 pounds. But now i using this NVMe hard drives in my Signature.

 

[samsungthegreatest]

Have you updated the replacement SDDs to the new firmware? Maybe they were old stock with the old firmware and that's why they failed again. And have you updated the firmware for the dying ones? The update fixed mine which had bad blocks. At least apparently. There's a possibility that the bad blocks were fixed when I formatted and made a new volume for it and the bad blocks were just isolated and new ones are going to appear. I won't know unless I use it for a few more months to see if any bad sectors appear. A nightmare. An expensive nightmare. And Samsung is treading us like lab rats, they try things on us but they refuse to tell us anything sensible related to the problem.

Actually haven't updated the firmware. Would be happy to if these IDIOTS from samsung provided any sound explaination of what this firmware is doing. From what i noticed after doing my expensive mistake, is that the data which is rarely accessed gets corrupted. So the NAND is shit. Rewriting the data even once daily would be a dirty hack but a reasonable one. If the new FW did it - it'd add 1800 TBW before warranty expires but that would work. But there is no description of what recent firmware is even doing/fixing.

Can't be loosing my data every 6 months. I made this raid because it's important And the drives have over 30k bad blocks each, currently. 20% of disk space is tested. All 3. So what (probably) happened is that during the boot some file which is used only during the boot got hit and cannot be read anymore from both disks (R10). I could just RMA them now or 12h ago... but want to see how bad this shit really is.

Can you run surface test on this disk which was fixed by FW update to see if errors are not re-appearing? (full test so files and empty space)
How long ago you fixed it?

Edit: current SMART status for one drive, will send new one when the test will finish

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 19077
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 73
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 094 094 000 Pre-fail Always - 145
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0013 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0013 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 31022
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 055 045 000 Old_age Always - 45
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 199 199 000 Old_age Always - 31022
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 5
235 Unknown_Attribute 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 44
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 535083726095

 

[JusTiCe8]

This is a good example of the crap we've been given, the 870 QVO is claim to be "reliable and sustainable" ! What a joke !
Maybe that's why all those disk are now such bad, all the moneys goes into pockets of these so called testers as all the drives have their significant failure percentage in all shop's reviews but awesome ratings in the "tests". It's the same for the Crucial MX-500 and the Sandisk SSD+, and pretty much all I guess, it's a lottery with only a few "lucky" winners.

Looks like these guys are as delusional as democrats, in their world, these garbage SSD are super reliable.

 

[samsungthegreatest]

Yeah. Toshiba announced PLC (Penta Level Cells) ... so can't even make 8 voltage levels (2^3) work correctly, but they're going for 32 levels. What could go wrong? Probably these SSDs will start failing before you finish installing Windows, but will be 15% cheaper to manufacture

It's a disaster. Every piece of technology is getting better over time but SSDs are getting so exponentially worse with each iteration that you can't even buy anything reliable anymore.

Hey Everyone, so update on the issue. After finishing badblock command I've got over 42k bad blocks on one of the SSDs. After reading it and seeing it's bad the controller should re-allocate, as there are reserved blocks (>90%) still available. So let's run the badblocks again to see if that's correct. I also made some shitty youtube videos to show before and after results so everyone can see it's legit, probably will share later.

Actually i run the command and after like 10 seconds 50 new errors popped up. So no need to make another post This thing is totally unusable. It can't even mark bad sectors properly after reading a weak block. So i would not count that any firmware update is fixing this s*t.
~+30s: 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 42155
~+2 minutes: 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 42475

Wouldn't have done it if i got ANY info about this issue from samsung support. Never buy these, for rarely accessed data - it'll just vanish. Because for sure some block in every larger file will get corrupted and you will no longer be able to read it.

SMART data after first run:

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 1
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 19087
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 73
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0013 094 094 000 Pre-fail Always - 145
179 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0013 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
181 Program_Fail_Cnt_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
182 Erase_Fail_Count_Total 0x0032 100 100 010 Old_age Always - 0
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0013 092 092 010 Pre-fail Always - 335
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 42111
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 071 045 000 Old_age Always - 29
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 199 199 000 Old_age Always - 42111
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 5
235 Unknown_Attribute 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 44
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 535083726095

 

[pathtonowhere]

Actually haven't updated the firmware. Would be happy to if these IDIOTS from samsung provided any sound explaination of what this firmware is doing. From what i noticed after doing my expensive mistake, is that the data which is rarely accessed gets corrupted. So the NAND is shit. Rewriting the data even once daily would be a dirty hack but a reasonable one. If the new FW did it - it'd add 1800 TBW before warranty expires but that would work. But there is no description of what recent firmware is even doing/fixing.

Can you run surface test on this disk which was fixed by FW update to see if errors are not re-appearing? (full test so files and empty space)
How long ago you fixed it?

Edit: current SMART status for one drive, will send new one when the test will finish

I updated the firmware a few days ago, the bad sectors disappeared, but the reallocated sectors in SMART remained the same. I copied files on the disk after the update and scanned before and after de copying and no bad sectors yet. I have to use it for a year to consider the problem fixed. I can't use the drive for a dual backup, I don't trust it enough yet, maybe I can use it for a third copy, which is a waste of money. Trust is hard to get back, sorry, Samsung. I'll go to WD from now on, and not mainly because of the failures, but because Samsung haven't said a word about the problem and they let clients to guess what's going on and what to expect from their drives. Decision makers at Samsung should be ashamed of themselves, they're a disgrace.

 

[JusTiCe8]

Return it, and get something else. I have had nothing but good luck from the WD stuff I have.

I've finally returned it and buy a Sandisk Ultra 3D instead, which looks like less prone to issues of all kind I've seen with Samsung, Crucial, and other less known brands.

Also, I never get disappointed by WD HDD I've bought seen more than a decade, but their Green and Blue SSD doesn't seems to be as good.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I've finally returned it and buy a Sandisk Ultra 3D instead, which looks like less prone to issues of all kind I've seen with Samsung, Crucial, and other less known brands.

Also, I never get disappointed by WD HDD I've bought seen more than a decade, but their Green and Blue SSD doesn't seems to be as good.

All of the SSD's I have are WD Black. The Blues can be good, but you have to look close at them to see what you are getting.

The Greens are cheap for a reason.

Anyways, it is safer to avoid Samsung for the moment, especially if you are looking for a plug and play solution.

 

[BBP]

Same issue here on my XP/Win7 machine, started at little above 1Tb of writes. Is it safe to update to the latest firmware (don't want it to die completely)? Samsung Magician does not let me update it (Failed to update firmware on the selected drive, windows 7 x64 with defender and firewall turned off). I'll try with the ISO later if somebody updated and it was ok. Thank you.

 

[P4-630]

Samsung Magician does not let me update it (Failed to update firmware on the selected drive, windows 7 x64

Maybe win7 is the issue, unsupported to do it's thing probably..

 

[SPDIF]

Update Firmware as soon as possible! Damage done will not go away, but it will stop degrading further ,keep in mind that this may not work in some cases.
If it still fail after update, then your drive is dying slowly and you have to RMA it.

It should work on Windows 7, did you download the latest version from Samsung?

You also could try it on a different computer.

 

[veodko]

My 980 PRO 1TB m.2 keeps degrading after software update to 5B2QGXA7 too. There still are 4 sectors marked as bad in magician's full scan, so this didn't change. But the number of encountered & unresolvable errors has gone up from 1BF0 (7152) to 3785 (14213) in just a few weeks. Magician's "recovery" just fails with an unknown error, very verbose.

Drive condition in crystaldisk dropped from 96 to 95%. Meanwhile Magician's SMART tells me everything is in good condition (even the unresolvable errors)

Another pre-mature death of a samsung drive.
I heard that some people had some success by backing up the drive, secure erasing it and restoring the image. Allegedly, the bad sectors had disappeared.

 

[samsungthegreatest]

My 980 PRO 1TB m.2 keeps degrading after software update to 5B2QGXA7 too. There still are 4 sectors marked as bad in magician's full scan, so this didn't change. But the number of encountered & unresolvable errors has gone up from 1BF0 (7152) to 3785 (14213) in just a few weeks. Magician's "recovery" just fails with an unknown error, very verbose.

Drive condition in crystaldisk dropped from 96 to 95%. Meanwhile Magician's SMART tells me everything is in good condition (even the unresolvable errors)

Another pre-mature death of a samsung drive.
I heard that some people had some success by backing up the drive, secure erasing it and restoring the image. Allegedly, the bad sectors had disappeared.

As for me - secure erase, plus full (long) format, then full scan... seems sectors can be correctly accessed again. But probably only because they were recently re-initialized and the drive will start to loose data again. This looks like the flash chips are faulty.

 

[P4-630]

My 980 PRO 1TB m.2 keeps degrading after software update to 5B2QGXA7 too.

Have been using one for just over a year now as C drive , including page file on C.
No issues.